Contesting Archives: Finding Women in the Sources
248
Contesting Archives: Finding Women in the Sources
248Hardcover(1st Edition)
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Overview
Global in scope, this volume demonstrates innovative research on diverse women from the sixteenth century to the present in Spain, Mexico, Tunisia, India, Iran, Poland, Mozambique, and the United States. Addressing gender, race, class, nationalism, transnationalism, and migration, these essays' subjects include indigenous women of colonial Mexico, Muslim slave women, African American women of the early twentieth century, Bengali women activists of pre-independence India, wives and daughters of Qajar rulers in Iran, women industrial workers in communist Poland and socialist Mozambique, and women club owners in modern Las Vegas. A foreword by Antoinette Burton adroitly synthesizes the disparate themes woven throughout the book.
Contributors are Janet Afary, Maryam Ameli-Rezai, Antoinette Burton, Nupur Chaudhuri, Julia Clancy-Smith, Mansoureh Ettehadieh, Malgorzata Fidelis, Joanne L. Goodwin, Kali Nicole Gross, Daniel S. Haworth, Sherry J. Katz, Elham Malekzadeh, Mary Elizabeth Perry, Kathleen Sheldon, Lisa Sousa, and Ula Y. Taylor.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780252035425 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Illinois Press |
| Publication date: | 06/09/2010 |
| Edition description: | 1st Edition |
| Pages: | 248 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.80(d) |
About the Author
Sherry J. Katz is a lecturer in the department of history at San Francisco State University.
Mary Elizabeth Perry is a retired professor of history at Occidental College and a research associate at the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. She is the author of The Handless Maiden: Moriscos and the Politics of Religion in Early Modern Spain.
Read an Excerpt
CONTESTING ARCHIVES
FINDING WOMEN IN THE SOURCESUNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2010 Board of Trustees of the University of IllinoisAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-07736-4
Introduction
Nupur Chaudhuri, Sherry J. Katz, and Mary Elizabeth Perry
The authors of the essays in this volume challenge the tired assumption that an archive is simply an immutable, neutral, and ahistorical place in which historical records are preserved. Rather than agreeing that an archive is merely a repository of information, these scholars view it as a site for the production of knowledge. Continuing a recent trend in women's history that reconceptualizes both the document and the archive, they have found in their archival work that women's voices and their texts were often obscured or lost altogether. And they have developed methodologies for creating new archives, finding new meanings by reading documents "against the grain," weaving together many layers of information to reveal complexities, working collectively to reconstruct the lives of women in the past.
In many ways, these authors continue methodological discussions that began in the 1960s and 1970s when new social historians and women's historians sought to recover the hitherto marginalized voices of working people, ethnic-racial communities, and women of all social and economic backgrounds. They found few of their subjects in standard archival sources and instead brought a host of new and unconventional sources to the fore, including social movement newspapers, songs and material objects, and oral histories. Our contributors describe the use of many varied materials in their search for women's experiences and gender ideologies as they work inside and outside the archives.
As historians of the 1960s and 1970s raised questions about who was left out of the historiography and began to reconstruct the underrepresented, they also questioned methods of archival collection that appeared to leave out the less powerful, and they made the case for preserving diverse voices and experiences. Women's historians, in particular, highlighted the exclusion of documents pertaining to women, who were not until quite recently considered legitimate subjects of history and therefore of archival collection. Nell Irvin Painter, for example, has argued that even many "achieving" women lacked their own archives because their papers were lost or destroyed or because no one considered them "important enough to warrant an archive."
As historians discovered that many groups seemed to be underrepresented in or excluded from archives, they began to critique the very conception of the archive as an objective, neutral, and disinterested institution that housed historical documents and artifacts. The idea of archival objectivity and neutrality in the collection of primary sources had predominated since the mid-nineteenth century. However, as librarians and archivists now attest, the act of collection is a subjective matter involving a series of decisions regarding what to keep, what to discard, how to organize what is kept, and for what purpose. Just as a document reflects the assumptions and agendas of its creator, so, too, does an archive. Although "their origins are often occluded and the exclusions on which they are premised often dimly understood, all archives come into being ... as a result of specific political, cultural, and socioeconomic pressures" and frequently feature documents of the powerful and privileged.
Postmodern critiques of the archives have continued to challenge "assumptions of archival neutrality" and have raised critical questions about whose history gets archived and, hence, preserved. In fact, Antoinette Burton's recent edited collection Archive Stories addresses "head-on the lingering presumptions about, and attachment to, the claims to objectivity with which archives have historically been synonymous." Many of the essays in Archive Stories question the objectivity of traditional archives as they explore the provenance, history, and power of specific archival sites to "shape the narratives which are to be 'found' there." Other essays "expand the definition of archival material" by naming as archives the "alternative historical material available to us when we wander outside conventional 'houses of history.'" The essays in this volume further these discussions by interrogating official documents found in traditional archives for what they can yield about the women who appear in sources never intended to preserve their voices and experiences, or by claiming as archives materials by women that traditional repositories thought unimportant to include.
Yet while women have been traditionally underrepresented in archives, their voices are sometimes found in abundance. Some of our contributors have uncovered personal or organizational papers left by the women they study, although these are often filled with fragments and silences. Others have located traces of their subjects' experiences in numerous records meant to record male-centered narratives. Even when women are not missing from the archives, reconstructing their lives and voices presents many methodological challenges.
The contributors to this volume illuminate a cross-section of divergent methodologies employed by historians of women and gender today. They make explicit the diverse methods of finding and analyzing a wide variety of sources and demonstrate much creativity in approaching hard-to-research subjects. Many of us are in one way or another "researching around" subjects who left few material traces of their own and appear in "highly fragmentary historical record[s]." Others are reading "against the grain" a single official document (or a few such documents) "for subtexts and silences." Still others are creating primary sources in the form of manuscript collections or oral interviews. A significant aspect of all of these methods is the importance of bringing a rich knowledge of the context and historiography into our analyses of the documents. As Ula Taylor suggests, "it is usually under the most difficult archival conditions that one must call most creatively and rigorously upon historical methods and theoretical ideas." Finally, the essays here also demonstrate a methodological self-consciousness regarding historians as history makers and raise questions about the relationship between our selves and our subjects.
The essays in this volume are divided into three parts. In "Locating Women in Official Documents," four historians use government or church records (and primarily single documents) to illuminate the lives of women who left no other traces in the historical record. Each of them argues that even a single document, if read with vast contextual knowledge, can be used to examine marginalized women and uncover their agency and their (however limited) power. They also point out that while these records are problematic because the female voices contained in the documents were produced by male-dominated institutions "inimical to women's interests or agency," they can reveal much about women's lives if read "against the grain."
Mary Elizabeth Perry's essay analyzes an Inquisition record from 1584 that sheds light on the experience of Fatima, a Muslim slave woman in early modern Spain. Perry deploys a three-part strategy for interrogating the single extant document containing traces of Fatima. She reads the source "against the grain," exploring the "subtexts and silences that can tell us more than the formulaic questions and responses that inquisitors sought and recorded in official male-centered documents." She contextualizes the document using other relevant primary sources and the historical literature. Finally, Perry utilizes insights from other disciplines-politics, anthropology, and cultural criticism. Fatima entered the historical record because she denied a cleric's claim that she had converted to Christianity while suffering from the plague in a hospital. At great risk to herself, Fatima held fast to her Muslim identity, denying that she had embraced Christianity and had taken a new name, Ana. She was tried and convicted as an apostate Morisca, a women who returned to Islam after embracing Christianity, at a time when fears of false conversions (and Morisco rebellion) ran high among Spanish and church authorities. Perry argues that Fatima's experience "opens for us the world of minority slave women," confirming their disenfranchisement but also demonstrating their resistance to-and their empowerment despite-official power. Fatima's case also reminds us, writes Perry, "that we do not have to abandon the study of women in the past simply because they do not appear in their own writings or in multiple documents."
Daniel S. Haworth's essay also unpacks a single government document. The document from mid-nineteenth-century Mexico is an unusual record of a woman's encounter with state authority in a source base in which very few women's voices appear. The 1854 case file records the efforts of nineteen-year-old Maria Petra Fernandez to secure "a legal declaration of her adulthood," in order to marry the man of her choice against the wishes of her legal guardian. In Haworth's hands, the file illuminates the agency of two groups of women, adolescent girls and widows, in early national Mexico. Haworth reads "'against the grain' of the multiple accounts that constitute the source," taking "note of hints and implied meanings" and coming to understand the "fragmentary information by drawing on relevant secondary sources." By applying his rich contextual knowledge of Mexican law, state, and society, Haworth finds two stories, "an official story of patriarchy confirmed" and an "unofficial story of patriarchy confounded." Haworth argues that Petra, with the help of her future mother-in-law (and a lawyer and priest recruited by the widow), succeeds in winning her freedom to marry by accommodating to and utilizing the patriarchal ideology and practices of the day. His awareness of "text and subtext" enables Haworth to recover female agency and subjectivity from sources that treat women largely as objects.
Julia Clancy-Smith interrogates a single document, the criminal proceedings of Giovanna Tellini, an Italian woman in residing in Tunis in the mid-nineteenth century. Clancy-Smith tells us that this is an unusual document, for it "represents one of the few extensive records on an immigrant woman of ordinary means and the social universe she inhabited." Tellini's story also represents "a history that no one wanted" because it focuses on "undesirable women," who were neither Muslim nor French (the colonial power in Tunis) in a historiography written largely from either imperial French or nationalist North African points of view. Yet Clancy-Smith is able to explore the social world of Tellini and women like her by bringing her considerable contextual knowledge to the fore: of European migration to North Africa; of the creation and movement across borders of consular and protectorate archival collections; of the network of counselor authorities in Tunis and the common patterns of criminal proceedings; of the hybrid Sicilo-Italian and Arabic writing used in Tunis at the time. She also employs a "comparative historical perspective" to examine the Tellini proceedings alongside other similar cases. Clancy-Smith finds that Tellini inhabited a pluralistic social world made up of immigrants from many different parts of Europe and North Africa who constructed a marginal and quasi-criminal economy to survive, and that they thereby challenged the power of authorities in their daily lives. Further, Tellini's story alerts us "to rips and tears in the nets of patriarchal control," spaces that women could sometimes exploit. Clancy-Smith also uses "the Giovanna that we 'found' inside and outside the archive" to suggest new ways to view European-Muslim relations and the mobility and migration of women and men in the nineteenth century.
Kali Nicole Gross examines prison and court documents related to the case of Henrietta Cook, a young, single African American domestic worker in early-twentieth-century Philadelphia who was tried and acquitted of infanticide. The account of Cook's encounter with the criminal justice system provides us with the rare voice of a working-class black woman. It reveals a window into the ways in which standards of sexual propriety and social respectability reverberated for black women of poorer backgrounds, as they did for better-studied elite African American women, in the Progressive Era. Gross's method of "making the most of prison records ... incomplete transcripts and court papers, and prison administrators' one-sided observations" involved knowledge of the broader historiography, and especially of how race, gender, and sexuality were constructed at the time. Her method also required empathy for her subject and careful analysis of these documents as rare texts of impoverished black women's voices and experiences. Gross suggests that seventeen-year-old Cook may have engaged in sexual intercourse "in the hopes of attaining respectability through marriage." When she found herself pregnant, however, she was desperate to retain the "appearance of chastity and respectability," attributes that were especially important for black women, who suffered from "negative assumptions about their morality." While on trial, Cook sought to project virtue "both as a means to convey legal innocence and as a measure to counteract the negative attributes assigned to blackness." Gross argues that incarcerated black women, who were often impoverished domestic workers, share much with black women as a whole in the early twentieth century, as they walked a "tightrope" regarding respectability, sexuality, and reproduction.
The second part of the book, "Integrating Varied Sources Found Inside and Outside Official Archives," contains six essays that seek to reconstruct women's experiences by weaving many partial and fragmented sources together in unique ways. These contributors suggest that even when a great variety of sources can be uncovered, interpreting them remains challenging if women's voices within the sources are filtered through others, if the documents represent scattered and incomplete fragments, if there are many silences in the extant materials, or if the historiographic context remains limited.
Lisa Sousa utilizes many diverse Spanish and indigenous language sources to illuminate gender prescriptions and roles in Nahua (Aztec) communities of central Mexico from 1520 to 1750. She argues that indigenous women of early Mexico "are not missing from the historical record, nor are they silent in the sources." On the contrary, native women can be found in many types of documents located in repositories in Mexico, the United States, and Europe: criminal records, civil documents, formal texts, and pictorial manuscripts. The challenge for Souza was not in locating sources containing traces of women, their social agency, and prescribed gender norms, but rather in "making sense of the fragmented and sometimes contradictory evidence regarding their roles and status." She describes a methodology in which she reads these diverse sources against one another to "shed light on multiple views and conflicting perspectives of gender rights and obligations." Souza likens this process to Nahua women's work of spinning and weaving, in which the raw material fragments are sifted, sorted, and spun "into threads of evidence" and further woven into multicolored fabric, "narratives that tell a coherent, complex story of Nahua women's lives." This process involved painstaking research on many continents and a deep philological understanding of the Nahuatl language and its written and pictographic forms. As she describes her work with different types of documents, Souza stresses that what was often most valuable was the "incidental information" found in them that gave her a sense of social roles, attitudes, and interactions among women and men, and relations between the Nahua and the colonial state. Sousa ends her essay with a discussion of how the process of weaving the sources together sheds light on Nahua women's labor. The economic roles and labors of men and women often overlapped, as they worked with one another to maintain the household, raise children, pay tribute, and protest Jesuit colonial authority. While women did not participate in the political apparatus, they were central to community life and to an agricultural system in which they owned and inherited land and tools.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Foreword: "Small Stories" and the Promise of New Narratives Antoinette Burton....................viiAcknowledgments....................xi
Introduction Nupur Chaudhuri, Sherry J. Katz, and Mary Elizabeth Perry....................xiii
1. Finding Fatima, a Slave Woman of Early Modern Spain Mary Elizabeth Perry....................3
2. Revealing an Orphan's Tale from Nineteenth-Century Mexico Daniel S. Haworth....................20
3. Locating Women as Migrants in Nineteenth-Century Tunis Julia Clancy-Smith....................35
4. Exploring Crime and Violence in Early-Twentieth-Century Black Women's History Kali Nicole Gross....................56
5. Spinning and Weaving the Threads of Native Women's Lives in Colonial Mexico Lisa Sousa....................75
6. Excavating Radical Women in Progressive-Era California Sherry J. Katz....................89
7. Recovering Women's Voices in Communist Poland Malgorzata Fidelis....................107
8. Archival Thinking and the Wives of Marcus Garvey Ula Y. Taylor....................125
9. Finding an Archive in Krishnobhabini Das's Englande Bangamohila Nupur Chaudhuri....................135
10. Uncovering Women and Gender in Qajar Archives of Iran Mansoureh Ettehadieh (Nezam Mafi), Elham Malekzadeh, Maryam Ameli-Rezaei, and Janet Afary....................156
11. Revealing New Narratives of Women in Las Vegas Joanne L. Goodwin....................177
12. Creating an Archive of Working Women's Oral Histories in Beira, Mozambique Kathleen Sheldon....................192
Contributors....................211
Index....................215